Research

I'm still working on this section. Since 2006 I've worked on many different parts of our computer poker effort, from state space abstraction to solving to evaluation and adaptation, and there's a lot of ground to cover.

My PhD thesis (2016) is a comprehensive end-to-end look at the task of computing strong strategies for imperfect information games, like Texas hold'em poker. It includes details of how we beat human poker pros at heads-up limit Texas hold'em in our 2008 Man-vs-Machine Poker Championship, how we constructed our Annual Computer Poker Competition "Hyperborean" agent from 2008 to 2014, and how we (University of Alberta team, plus Oskari Tammelin) solved heads-up limit Texas hold'em in 2015.

My Masters thesis (2007) described how we first challenged poker pros in our 2007 Man-vs-Machine match, which we narrowly lost. It describes the core components in detail, including the CFR algorithm that we used to solve large games, simplify games to a tractable size, and adapt to opponents. All of these aspects have undergone quite a bit of evolution in the last 9 years, though, and the PhD thesis largely replaces this work.